Oculus Rift may be headed to smartphones

Oculus Rift, which made its Kickstarter debut last summer, can best be described as a high field of view (FOV), low-latency, consumer-priced virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD).

According to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, the company is excited about the possibility of plugging the upcoming headset "right into a next-gen cellphone." Iribe also told Edge (via GameIndustry) that Oculus has considered linking up with technology like the Xbox 360 Kinect and PlayStation Move, although its current focus is on bringing the headset to PC and next-gen mobile devices.

"I love consoles but internally we're a lot more excited about where mobile's going to go, and being able to plug it right into a next gen cellphone. It's the innovation, and how fast cellphones are now improving - where we'll be with the next Galaxy or the next iPhone compared to where consoles are," said Iribe.

"Those things are almost doubling every year, compared to a console that's just stuck it out for eight years - it just makes us very excited. There's a lot of improvements that can be made on the hardware side for VR that no-one's doing yet because it's a new thing. The mobile rate of innovation is going to be able to make a lot of those improvements."

Lastly, Iribe commented on the (general) 2014 target release window for Oculus, confirming there were still some technological hurdles to overcome.

"We don't want to announce any dates because frankly we just don't know when it's going to be really ready for the consumer market where everything is tied together," he added.

"You have the form factor, HD, motion blur eliminated... so we don't know how long that will take, but it's close. We have internal prototypes which have a lot of each thing solved and it's such a magical experience when you see it all together."